Blowouts. Nasty when you're on the receiving end of one. Just as bad to deliver it? Every time my team has taken someone to the woodshed in the last few years we've been rewarded for it with a terrible run for the next few games. It's regular as clockwork: crush someone, serve a kharmic penalty. Or is it that in scoring all those goals we blew our wad? Does it ratchet up our confidence too high? Whatever it is, it sucks.
I'm not talking a 5-1 convincing win. I'm talking a thrashing: 8-1, 10-2. Real blowouts. The kind of game where everyone just wants it over with about 10 minutes to play. You worry about fights. You worry about injuries. You worry about people thinking you guys are jerks for running up the score.
It happened to us again this season. We're 4-2-1, playing the worst team in the division and we break out a can of whup-ass. It didn't actually feel like we were outplaying them that badly, but I guess we were. It went into the record books as a 9-1 shellacking, and to be honest, the one goal didn't go in the net (I was standing right there; it wasn't in). So now we're 5-2-1. What happens next? Scoring drought. Six atrocious, painful, bloody games without a win and with precious few goals. Thank goodness we managed a come-from-behind 4-4 tie and another 1-1 tie. 0-4-2. Brutal.
At the end of the stretch we again faced the team we'd blown out 7 games before. In the meantime they began to get a little better (winning their first two games of the season). Instead of another blowout, we won a close game. And our kharma came back. We're playing decent hockey again.
The question remains: at some point you know it's a blowout; what do you do to prevent the inevitable slide? Stop shooting?
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